John Cage's 4'33" is an artistic statement that knocks the Turner Prize into a
cocked hat, says Norman Lebrecht

For next year’s Turner Prize, I shall submit my solo performance, at nine o’clock tonight, of John Cage’s masterpiece 4'33", a work of such visionary clarity that it renders the entire construct of conceptual art intellectually redundant.

That’s a terrible charge to make about a movement founded on the precarious proposition that the idea behind a work takes precedence over any creative or aesthetic invention on the gallery wall or floor. Much of what has been passed off as conceptual art over the past 25 years, with the Turner Prize as a defining engine, has added greatly to the popularity of art galleries, and pricked no end of holes in the bow-tied twits who had been telling us for the previous quarter-century that art was all about ascetic modernism, abstract lines and spaces resembling the sketchbook of an autistic architect.

Conceptual art was a necessary corrective – so I shared the public delight in piles of bricks and pickled sharks, and clutched myself with mirth when a self-designated “collector” paid more for Richard Wilson’s tub of sump oil than an honest Somali pirate might demand for the release of a hijacked tanker.

Although easy to poke fun at – never more so than in Martin Creed’s The Lights Going On and Off, which won the 2004 Turner Prize – conceptual art democratised the process of art appreciation. Any child can understand someone flicking the lights on and off; most have tried it at home. Seeing it in a gallery makes them think, helps them towards forming concepts of their own. Conceptual art was always quicker and cleverer than its conservative critics gave it credit for, always closer to the mass market than the academies of art. Charles Saatchi’s offer earlier this year to donate his private collection to the nation was the strongest imaginable validation of the boundless public engagement with this vibrant period in our art history.

That period is now over. It ended on Tuesday night, when Susan Philipsz, a Glaswegian, was awarded the 2010 Turner Prize for a “sound installation”, played in an otherwise bare room, of the artist singing Scottish dirges in various public spaces. “The way she’s managed to make you look at things differently by hearing things differently is really quite exceptional,” said Penelope Curtis, the chairman of the judging panel and, since April, the director of Tate Britain.

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Dr Curtis, a former curator of the Henry Moore Institute and an expert on Barbara Hepworth, has impeccable credentials in 20th-century British art. She is neither a fool nor a prisoner of the powerful taste-makers who patrol contemporary art. So it is a measure of the terminal state of conceptual art that a woman of her rigour and experience could be persuaded that the droning of a performing artist with an untrained voice and a phoney name was in any way “exceptional”, or that it might make us “look at things differently by hearing things differently”.

There was nothing different or new about the busking Turner winner. Everything Miss Philipsz had to say – or croon – had been conceived in 1946 and executed in 1952 by the vastly underrated American composer John Cage, an original thinker of rare, unflinching honesty.

Tonight, all over the world, enthusiasts like me will take a few minutes out of our Sunday reading to perform Cage’s seminal work 4'33". Some will do so as part of “Cage Against the Machine”, a loosely organised protest against Simon Cowell’s monstrous manipulation of pop culture. The uprising, which has 40,000 Facebook fans, aims to produce an alternative Christmas number one, just as a similar protest involving the US band Rage Against the Machine kept Cowell off the top spot last year.

Others will simply contemplate the ethereal purity of a post-classical masterpiece. The printed score is itself an object of beauty. Published by Peters Edition (price $5.95), it consists of two sheets of stave-lined paper marked only by movement titles. There are 23 recordings (including one by Frank Zappa) and the BBC gave the work an orchestral showing in January 2004, conducted by Lawrence Foster and nationally televised.

What happens in 4'33" is precisely nothing. At the world premiere in Woodstock, New York, in August 1952, David Tudor came onto the stage, shut the lid of the piano, sat at the closed keyboard for the required four minutes and thirty-three seconds, rose, bowed and left. Someone cried: “Good people of Woodstock, let’s run these people out of town.”

Few, amid the uproar, understood that Cage had revealed a blinding truth about music – that music is not a product owned and manufactured by musicians. Silence is also music. So are all the ambient sounds we choose to shut out when listening to a concert – the squeaking of leather shoes, the wheezing of a rheumy neighbour, the rumbling of distant traffic, the noise of one’s own thoughts. “What they thought was silence,” said Cage, “was full of accidental sounds.” All were part of art. To ignore or deny them was to reduce listening to music to a matchbox monotony.

Cage, who died in 1992, was not the first to break down these perceptual barriers. Gustav Mahler used offstage sounds from his first symphony on. Erik Satie, during the First World War, introduced musique d’ameublement (furniture music), urging Parisians to talk and move around as the musicians played. Charles Ives wanted his fourth symphony to be played by different ensembles from opposing mountain tops. Ananda K Coomaraswamy, curator at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and an acquaintance of Cage’s, argued that all Western art was purposeless unless it embraced the sights, sounds and smells of daily life. Cage did just that in 4'33".

The work tells us as much about our pretensions and expectations as it does about music. It gives the listener absolute control over the experience and makes a mockery of the industry that has turned one of life’s great joys into a string of jingles. Participating in it is a liberating moment, a chance to put all the taste-makers – from Cowell to Lloyd Webber, Nicholas Serota to Nick Clegg – into their proper pigeonholes as peddlers of ephemera that bear no relation to the world around us.

The Turner Prize has run itself into a brick wall of worn-out concepts. Next year, I shall submit my performance of 4'33", not as a recording – so 20th-century – nor even as a manifesto, but as an immaterial idea, a blank sheet of paper on which the future of art can be reconsidered from scratch.